


Love Me Like the Ocean

by Curator



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: F/M, La Sirena, trigger warning: reminisce of a suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27273937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curator/pseuds/Curator
Summary: She thought their first time would be a mistake. He figures out why it isn’t.
Relationships: Agnes Jurati/Cristóbal Rios
Comments: 21
Kudos: 28





	Love Me Like the Ocean

**Author's Note:**

> So much thanks to Regionalpancake for chatting with me about _Picard_ and life and creativity. This ficlet wouldn’t have happened without her wonderfully infectious energy.

You think she’s annoying. Prattling when you’re trying to read. Asking you questions not because she cares about the answers but because she’s bored. 

You’re bored, too. You’re bored of space and passengers and people who talk too much. 

But you’re practicing fútbol, the one time of day when you can be breathless, heart pounding, focused only on the ball — _¡mira! mira la pelota_ , Papà would shout — and she’s there, her dark eyes large and lost. 

You don’t love her. 

You’re not even sure if you like her.

But it’s been a while. 

She says this is a mistake, and she’s right. She’s not your type. She’s got the quick wit you like, yes, but she’s jumpy, nervous. And she talks too much. 

“You know,” she says, her neck soft under your lips, “when I used to feel lonely, I would sit outside and watch the East China Sea. The sound of waves is relaxing, right? The smell, too. All those negative ions in the air and —”

You quiet her with your mouth and she gives underneath you. 

She’s trembling. 

“Look,” you pull away, “we don’t have to do this.”

“No,” her head shakes, “I want to. You— you remind me of the ocean, of the peace I feel there. I can’t explain it.”

And you know why you’re drawn to her. 

As a boy, you watched the _Mar Chileno_ , white-created waves calling to you like the seafarer you would have been in another age. Your mother would tease you, say the siren song of the sea was your great love. You didn’t believe it until you saw the water at night, starry, endless.

“When,” your voice is hoarse, “did you go to the ocean?”

“In Okinawa? All the time,” she says. “In the morning, during my lunch hour, at night.”

You tell her. You’ve only told that damn, useless Starfleet counselor, but you tell Agnes how you set out at night — your Starfleet duffel bag in your boyhood bedroom, Captain Vandermeer’s bloodstains against your eyelids when you tried to sleep — and you began to swim the star-studded waves. You figured you would get tired, then rest. Shark food. That’s what you would be good for. 

But you heard the siren song your mother had teased you about so many years before. And the song wasn’t calling you into the water. The song was calling you out of it, a hymn to air in your lungs and deck plating under your feet.

Your mind was willing.

Your arms and legs were lead. 

She carried you — the mermaid, _la sirena_. She sang to you and she carried you and she promised you that everything would be fine. 

You woke up with sand in your ear, sunlight on your face. 

Starfleet kicked you out, but you thanked _la sirena_ , murmured that you would never forget her. 

She gave you life. 

A life you now understand you’ve been pissing away.

“You tried to talk to me, Agnes,” you say. “I didn’t want to listen. But if I remind you of the ocean and you remind me to live — not just be alive, but _live_ — then maybe this isn’t such a mistake?”

She tells you about Bruce, how she admired him and thought that was love. She took her wounded heart to the sea and felt safe there. But she never dove into the waves, never dared to be weightless in water that could lift her up or pull her down. Is it too late, she asks, too late to find strength in currents and movement and a blue that can appear black at night, to live life in motion instead of sitting on the shore?

Dark eyes turn to you and they’re not so lost anymore.

Your mouth meets hers and it’s not to shut her up this time. It’s because you hope she’ll keep talking to you for a long, long time. 


End file.
